Do You Take Responsibility End To End?
(This is the second in a series of lessons learned from Steve Jobs for independent professionals.)
Do you take responsibility "end to end?"
Or do you find yourself making excuses and blaming someone or something else?
Here is one way to tell: If you are late, do you ever blame "traffic?" 
Or do you say, "I failed to leave enough time to get here at 8:00. I apologize."
If it is the latter, you have courage, and you are taking responsibility.
Walter Isaacson described Steve Jobs' passion for controlling the Apple ecosystem: controlling software, hardware, and even the customer experience at the Apple stores. It was important to manage and take responsibility for every part of every process. Almost nothing was left to chance. This led to massive levels of consumer confidence and trust in Apple products.
As independent professionals, we are responsible for everything we do. Even when we outsource things, our clients don't usually know or care. They only see what we deliver, and how we act. By us taking full responsibility, we show courage, build credibility and trust with our clients. We demonstrate that we will always be responsible for doing our best for them.
In what ways do you take full responsibility?
In what ways do you see people avoiding responsibility? How does that impact their "brand?"
(The first in the Steve Jobs series is: Focus: Lessons Learned from Steve Jobs for Independent Professionals)
Good food for thought. While Realtors are not directly responsible for the performance of escrow companies, home inspectors or lenders, we are the ones often recommending them, so buyers & sellers often consider their Realtor as the project manager for the entire escrow. So when an escrow officer does not act with urgency or he/she makes mistakes, I apologize to my clients and then get on the phone with escrow to correct the problem.
Dennis, so glad to hear about your practice here in taking responsibility ‘end to end’. Ed’s post made me think too about what I had been doing with current clients, and the ‘blame on traffic’ was something I had slipped into rather than planning an extra half hour and arriving early perhaps to meetings.
But the real thing it made me look at was much deeper (as you did in seeing how you were responsible for your referrals working for your clients!): Was I delivering satisfaction in the process of my service? Putting myself in my client’s shoes, would I say I would heartily recommend me, or would I say something needed to change? This line of thinking prompted me to re-assess a current fee arrangement with one of my clients, ask him about his level of satisfaction and re-adjust my fee schedule (essentially delaying payment on a pre-arranged schedule because I audited what he got for the fees paid and said it wasn’t matching yet). What is great about this is 1) I feel happier and more satisfied with my own efforts on his behalf; 2) He was appreciative of my pro-active stance towards him; and 3) He and I became much closer and built more trust together in our focus on his development. While I hadn’t made a mistake, or done anything wrong, just the review on ‘mutual satisfaction’ caused so much “new possibility” to happen.
Thanks for sharing your story too, it will help me give examples of responsibility also including what another does to another.
Romi
Romi, What a great way to use this concept. To think about all aspects of your relationship with a client and to see if there are parts that can be improved upon. And when YOU initiate that question, it does exactly what you describe: deepens the trust and the relationship. Thank you for this.
–Ed
Dennis,
Thanks for expanding this idea and sharing your experience. When a client sees you taking responsibility for the whole process, even though they know that escrow or loan agents have glitches, I believe it garners more respect for you as a professional in the client’s eyes.
–Ed